Stay (2005)

The general feeling I left this movie with was, something was missing. This was a short movie by today’s standards, only 99 minutes. I thought about The Sixth Sense while I watching it, there was a similar feel. Death always lingering around the corner but never manifested, a psychiatrist in bad clothing and a patient that is barely coherent, with a huge reveal at the end. However, there is such a lack of storytelling that in the end, as much as one may guess to understand, there are so many things that still don’t make sense and you leave feeling unfulfilled.

My initial reaction was to give this a much lower rating. The whole movie literally comes about in the last five minutes of the show. Starring a good cast of Ryan Gosling, Naomi Watts, and Ewan MacGregor, the movie revolves around a young man (Gosling) who comes for help from a pyschiatrist named Sam Foster (MacGregor). Gosling declares he is going to kill himself on Saturday at 12 pm, and the drama begins. MacGregor becomes obsessed with this patient, and their lives become inseperable in this dreamscape of an environment.

My conclusion, that in the end, we see that as (Spoiler) Gosling is dying we realize the whole first part of the movie is the mind’s logical explanation for what is happening as he is dying, trying to grasp what is happening and making a more worthy cause of death then the present one. The effects in the movie are cool, they probably don’t add much to it, but for a visual person I enjoyed them a lot. But again, you leave without any true traditional storytelling, more with a gimic of trying to confuse you and nothing more, and you want some more truths.

If you want to be challenged, you may enjoy this. I would have given this a higher rating if I thought I would ever watch it again. I like it for being different, I just wish it would have been just a touch more traditional.

Here are some similar arcade posts

• Elizabethtown (2005)
• The Incredibles (2004)
• Illusionist (2006)
• The Island (2005)
• American History X (1998)

If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.